Another successful conference is in the books. Your sales team scanned business cards of people ranging from random badge scans to qualified prospects. The leads are automatically passed into your digital marketing automation tool, where they’re funneled into a generic, one-size-fits-all nurture track. But by the time account managers are alerted that the leads have hit the CRM and reach out, the leads have already been inundated with information.
If we evaluate the scenario above, we find that this isn’t just a failure of collaboration — it’s a failure of configurability.
Behind every successful cross-functional relationship is a set of tools to advance communication and productivity. Many believe that if we simply find a way to allow these tools to talk to each other, we’re destined for limitless collaboration and maximum visibility.
However, this isn’t always the case. With most integrations, data makes its way across platforms just fine. Things fall apart because each team has its own independent workflow with zero visibility into what other teams are doing with this information. And, as a result, the customer experience falls short.
As the collaboration space grows more vast, leading companies are looking at ways to go beyond simply connecting tools. “If you don’t disrupt, an existing competitor will seize the opportunity to leverage cloud and AI capabilities to enable digital transformation,” says Art Schoeller, VP and Principal Analyst, Forrester. “Whoever can master and scale this will win.”
Leading collaborative work management tools have the power to do more than share information. They can knit together workflows across teams, effectively using automation and AI to trigger specific actions and a series of events that amplify team performance and create better customer experiences.
Here are 3 workflows every company should connect to optimize the customer experience:
1. Sales → Customer Success
It’s not uncommon for sales and customer success teams to clash. Gaps in communication and poor visibility as a result of a siloed relationship make it difficult to move the customer forward without any issues. Distrust and a tug-of-war relationship over ownership of accounts not only creates friction between the two teams but takes a toll on customers.
Many issues arise when there is no clear way to “pass the baton” from sales to customer success. By building a process that leverages the historical knowledge of the customer the account manager has, the customer success manager can tailor their follow-up for a more personalized experience.
Once a lead converts, customer success should be instantly notified so they can begin the transition. With an integrated workflow, sales activity in a CRM can auto-trigger an action from customer success — giving both teams visibility into their interactions with the customer.
Here’s an example of a Wrike Integrate recipe where a closed-won lead triggers an action from customer success:
By automating this transition process using a work management tool, you can clearly define where the sales process ends and the customer success experience begins. Once a lead converts, a project is created and auto-populated with data from the CRM, and auto-assigned to a customer success manager, notifying them of the new customer.
Click here for a list of all apps that integrate with Wrike --->
From there, customer success can begin their outreach knowing details of the new customer’s experience with the account manager. Streamlining and documenting this transition process ensures the customer experience is seamless and aligns both teams on next steps.
2. Content → Design
Marketing is another department that can connect and automate workflows to enhance the customer experience. Content and design teams specifically need to consistently be in sync on the overall direction, messaging, and branding of public-facing assets. With separate teams working on copy and visuals, it can be a struggle to share a common vision and communicate expectations effectively.
From the visuals to the language, your customer’s interaction with your brand is key to building trust and loyalty. While an occasional typo is often excusable (and simply human), frequent errors in spelling, off-brand imagery, and poorly laid-out emails can cost you business.
Bridging the gaps between content and design workflows using a work management platform can improve communication between teams and also keep feedback all in one place. Wrike Integrate allows users to not only create rules that trigger actions across different applications but allows you to automate within Wrike itself.
Let’s say your content and design teams are working to launch a promo banner for an upcoming eBook. Using Wrike Integrate, you can build an automated workflow that will alert the design team once the copy task is marked complete so they can begin.
Once the design task is completed, another task would auto-assign an approver(s) to look over the banner copy and design together. Assigning designated approvers to review and leave feedback can prevent off-brand messaging and make it clear who has the authority to provide changes.
After assets and copy are marked approved, that action can trigger a task for the marketing operations team telling them the banner is ready to be pushed live. Not only does this new process eliminate long email chains and lost IM chats, but it cuts down on iterations and standardizes a process for pushing assets live — ensuring your customers always see the best side of your brand.
3. Support → Customer Success
Every customer encounters some level of technical difficulties with a new solution. Their loyalty depends on how your customer service team tackles these support requests.
When a customer is waiting to hear back about an issue with your product, how frustrating would it be for them to receive an email from their customer success manager (who has zero knowledge of the issue) about attending a webinar? Or even worse, an email from a sales rep with an upsell pitch?
Avoid these costly mistakes by integrating your support and customer success workflows so all teams are aware of a customer’s ticket, and can make the most of client management solutions. Imagine if a ticket in your support platform triggered a new task in your work management system. The task would automatically assign the customer’s success manager to notify them that their client is dealing with an issue and has contacted support. It would also include all ticket details and a due date indicating when the customer success rep should follow up to see how the customer is doing.
Cool, right? But a tool like Wrike Integrate enables you to take it to the next level and connect more than 2 team workflows.
What if the triggered follow-up task could also generate a note on the customer in the CRM, ensuring the sales rep doesn’t reach out for an upsell during the support process? Once the customer success manager marks this follow-up task complete, this could generate another task assigned to marketing ops to add this customer to a special nurture campaign.
This level of tool configurability, workflow connectivity, and team collaboration ensures the customer is always receiving the right message at the right time!
Configuration goes beyond productivity
“Collaboration is the connective tissue of customer experience.” -- Art Schoeller, Analyst, Forrester
Your customers shouldn’t be treated like another email in your lead-gen machine. With this level of configuration management and transparency across your customer-facing teams, your customers feel prioritized and truly valued by your brand.
Automating repetitive workflows and syncing cross-team processes provides context and visibility to better personalize the customer experience. While productivity and communication are common outcomes of configurability, the true benefit lies in fostering a customer base that continues to grow with your brand.
Try Wrike Integrate today to start connecting your workflows for a better customer experience --->
